To See Oneself with Curiosity

Tianshu Pan

He told me that he wanted to share, on that platform, the story of how he came to study anthropology and eventually make a living from it — becoming a very ordinary university teacher.

He said that last night, during a preparatory meeting for this talk, he happened to meet a dubbing expert, Mr. Jiang — Jiang Guangtao — and that conversation reminded him that he himself had almost become a voice actor.

He said that when he was in the third or fourth grade of elementary school, he was lucky enough to work alongside people whom Jiang Guangtao now calls “god-level” figures in the dubbing world.

He laughed and said, “But unfortunately, after puberty, my voice became what it is now.”

“So today,” he said, “if any of you find what I say even a little interesting, it definitely won’t be because of my acting skills or my voice. It’ll probably just be because some of the things I talk about are amusing.”

He said that when his voice changed — becoming, as he put it, neither male nor female — it was terrible, and that left him with only one path to choose.

But, he said, “my curiosity never went away.”

He said that back when he was dubbing, it was still the traditional way — at the Shanghai Film Dubbing Studio.

When the famous voice actors performed, he was just a child who needed only to shout a few lines.

“But,” he said, “I was endlessly curious.”

Curious about what?

“About the foreign cultures that appeared in those films,” he said, “and about the words those foreigners spoke.”

He said he had felt an instinctive pull — that he should learn to speak their language.

That curiosity, he said, led him to study English.

By a stroke of luck, in the third grade, he was able to go to the University of Leeds in England to study English and American literature.

And while studying literature there for a year, he realized that literature might not actually be what interested him most — culture was.

He said, “Why do these British people have so many prejudices against us Chinese? Why?”

He said that even though the Britain of the 1980s had already changed a great deal, when he and his friends imagined it before going abroad, they still pictured a land of gentlemen and London as the ‘foggy city.’

“But when I arrived in London,” he said, “there wasn’t a single day of fog.”

That experience, he said, made him feel he needed a discipline that could answer what seemed like shallow questions — questions about people’s assumptions and worldviews.

And that was how, he said, his journey into anthropology began.

Then he said he wanted to start with a story.

Two years ago, in a sweltering August, he went to Washington University in St. Louis for a workshop.

After landing at the airport, he was exhausted and took a taxi.

The driver, who seemed to be in high spirits, noticed he was Chinese — there weren’t many Chinese passengers going that way — and asked, “What brings you to St. Louis in this weather?”

“I’m here for a workshop,” he replied.

“What field?”

“Anthropology,” he said.

The driver responded immediately: “Hey, I know anthropology — Margaret Mead!”

He thought, Wow, that’s impressive.

He said that Mead’s most famous work — one many in the audience might already know — was Coming of Age in Samoa.

It had addressed the problem of American adolescence in the 1920s, but Mead had approached it with a deeply curious, almost exoticizing gaze toward “the other,” the people of Samoa in the South Pacific.

She lived among the local girls, he said, wearing the same clothes they did, learning about their daily lives, observing why Samoan teenagers didn’t seem to suffer the same social anxieties American youth did during rapid modernization.

That book, he said, became an overnight bestseller in the United States.

“So far as I can tell,” he said, “no other anthropologist has written a book that sold more than hers.”

Her influence, he said, even extended into American parenting culture and pediatrics.

A famous American doctor, Dr. Spock, whose child-rearing books shaped generations, had been influenced by her ideas.

Time Magazine, he said, once named Margaret Mead one of the three most important American women of the twentieth century.

Then he spoke of another anthropologist — perhaps even more widely known through her book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

He said that this anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, was Mead’s senior — “her shijie, as we’d say in Chinese,” he explained — or perhaps, he added with a knowing smile, something more than that.

Their descendants, he said, had already publicly acknowledged the closeness of their relationship.

Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, he said, had been essential reading during the American occupation of Japan — even General MacArthur had studied it.

According to credible sources, he said, MacArthur once asked Benedict whether he should abolish the Japanese imperial family.

And Benedict firmly told him he must not.

“So,” he said, “the reason I start with these two stories is to show how, at anthropology’s peak, the discipline was known by almost every American household.”

“When people thought of anthropology then,” he said, “these names came instantly to mind.”

“And that,” he added, “coincided with the rise of the United States itself — a fascinating parallel.”

But, he said, by the 1960s — the time when The Chrysanthemum and the Sword had been completed, just after World War II — anthropology’s public influence had reached its zenith.

It was the peak of what was called the ‘American Century.’

And yet, when he began his own journey into anthropology, in the 1990s — 1993, to be precise — things were very different.

He said he was fortunate then to be admitted to Harvard University.

At the same time, though, he had questions.

“Yes, anthropology had been very successful in America,” he said, “but within the discipline, it had splintered.”

There were now many subfields, each with its own theories, and the different schools of thought no longer spoke to one another.

So, he said, the miracle that Mead and Benedict once created felt like a distant memory — and that, he believed, was unfortunate.

He smiled and said that, despite that, he had been lucky to meet the teacher who probably mattered most to him in his years of study.

Then he showed me a photo of his teacher. “Look,” he said, “he seems to be staring right at me.”

He said that his years studying anthropology coincided with the 1990s — a time when China itself was beginning to rise.

His teacher had told him, “Forget China.”

He said, “I kept pondering why he told me that — but of course, I never truly forgot China.”

And in fact, he added, his teacher’s own research had never really forgotten China either.

He showed two photographs that marked two different stages of his teacher’s research.

“The left one,” he said, “is a classic.”

It showed James Watson conducting fieldwork in the 1960s and 1970s in the Pearl River Delta — specifically the Hong Kong side.

At that time, Watson — “a red-guard at heart,” he joked — had longed to enter mainland China, but because of the Cold War, couldn’t.

So instead, Watson studied a lineage group called Man in Hong Kong’s New Territories — the region closest to the mainland — using anthropology to examine ancestral rites.

The photo, he said, captured a precious field moment — one of the rare complete images of an ancestral ritual still being performed.

“Imagine this,” he said. “When the ritual began, across the Shenzhen River, on the mainland side, people’s communes were still blaring revolutionary songs.”

Then he pointed to the photo on the right.

“That’s Watson decades later,” he said.

“By then he was a famous Harvard professor.”

In the early 1990s, he said, McDonald’s opened in Hong Kong’s rural towns.

Local teenagers and children were ecstatic — they dragged him, the scholar who had spent twenty years studying them, to what he had always thought of as junk-food heaven.

He said, “He couldn’t understand why — how people who’d spent generations believing Cantonese cuisine was the world’s finest could be thrilled about an American fast-food chain.”

“But,” he said, “that curiosity led to a whole new study.”

That second study, he said, earned Watson even greater fame.

He told me that from his teacher, he learned something crucial: that anthropology could do many things.

In 2006, he said, he officially began teaching at Fudan University.

Then came the question: how could he reconstruct this discipline in his own way?

In China, he explained, anthropology usually existed as ethnology, archaeology, or physical anthropology — not quite as the same social-science discipline it had become abroad.

In his case, it was a subfield within sociology.

“So,” he said, “inspired by my teacher, I started doing different things.”

He began studying youth culture at Fudan University — in collaboration with Microsoft China — trying to look at familiar life with a sense of curiosity, almost as if it were foreign.

“That,” he said, “is very difficult.”

He also collaborated with Intel on research about information flows in rural China — what he called ICT studies.

He studied the social workers who supported employees in fast-food industries in Taiwan and Hong Kong — “the McJobs people,” he said, using the English term.

He said all these projects were attempts to use a curious, almost alien gaze to look at one’s own everyday culture — “and that,” he said, “was deeply enjoyable.”

“All this,” he said, “was my way of venting frustration at the over-professionalization of American and European anthropology — its self-indulgence, its transformation into an intellectual game.”

He said he wanted to reconnect theory and application.

But anthropology, he reminded me, must also pay attention to life and death.

“I’ve always believed,” he said, “that its ultimate goal is to understand, through our methods and perspectives, what it means to be human.”

Then he mentioned his second teacher — “the strictest member of my committee,” he said — who had supported his return to China.

One outcome of that support, he said, was a research center they had built together, which had since produced three books: Stories of Pain, The Weight of Morality, and Global Drugs — all works by that teacher.

He said that after returning to China, he wanted to make anthropology meaningful again.

So he mentioned three figures whose work, he said, could offer inspiration.

The first, on the left, was his collaborator Arthur Kleinman — “Kai Bowen” in Chinese.

He said Kleinman’s works were widely translated in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China — “though in America,” he said with a faint frown, “he’s not exactly a public figure. I’m not happy about that, but that’s the way it is.”

“In the United States,” he said, “the public figures are actually the other two.”

“The one in the middle, you can recognize,” he said.

“That’s Jim Yong Kim, former president of the World Bank.”

“And the one on the right,” he said, “is his friend, the person I especially want to talk about today — Paul Farmer.”

He said Jim Yong Kim’s path to the World Bank presidency began with Paul Farmer and the organization they co-founded: Partners in Health.

That group, he said, did the impossible.

“If the speaker before me asked ‘Why not?,’” he said, “then their answer would be: ‘Why not build the best hospitals in the world’s poorest, most chaotic countries?’”

“If those two hadn’t studied anthropology,” he said, “their lives would’ve followed a typical medical path — Harvard Medical School, stable careers, upper-middle-class comfort.

Busy lives, yes, but no material worries.”

“But because they studied anthropology,” he said, “they chose hardship.”

He said, “They built hospitals with their own money, sometimes begging for cheap medicines, traveling to Haiti, Rwanda, Peru — places ravaged by AIDS and tuberculosis — far worse off than even the poorest areas of China.”

“And yet,” he said, “a miracle happened — they succeeded.”

“It wasn’t just about money.”

Then he told me about a taxi driver he met that May in Boston.

He had gone there for a Harvard conference and visited the Partners in Health office.

In the taxi, he and a Chinese-American professor were speaking Mandarin, but he kept saying English names — Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim, Partners in Health.

The driver, originally from Haiti, suddenly became excited.

He turned and asked, “Which Paul Farmer are you talking about? Are you going there?”

And when he gave them the receipt, he had written a message on the back — a blessing for Paul Farmer.

He smiled and said, “Let’s finish with some gossip.”

He explained that Farmer and Kim, the two on the right, had been the earliest founders of Partners in Health.

“They had no idea they’d become famous,” he said.

“Even Jim Yong Kim probably never imagined he’d one day be president of the World Bank.”

Then he showed a photo of President Obama announcing Kim’s appointment on the White House lawn.

Beside it, he said, was the cover of a book.

“Do you know who that woman is?” he asked.

“She’s an anthropologist — Obama’s mother.”

“So,” he said, “whatever controversies surrounded that appointment, perhaps it marked something good for anthropology — maybe a chance for the discipline to return to the public, to become more engaged, more forward-looking, more deeply rooted.”

He said that Jim Yong Kim viewed disease as a deadly manifestation of poverty, and that he had vowed to reduce global poverty to 3 percent by 2030.

“Few anthropologists make promises like that,” he said.

“But maybe it gives us hope — it sounds like a daydream, sure, but still hope.”

He said, “If the World Bank president himself is trying to make that dream real — perhaps, in some way, he’s carrying forward the dream of Obama’s mother, the anthropologist who spent most of her life in poor Indonesian villages, helping people build livelihoods.”

Then he said, “To end, I want to come back to curiosity.”

He showed two images often used in professional anthropology classrooms as reminders — warnings of mistakes anthropologists must never repeat.

On the left, he said, was a famous American cartoon satirizing anthropologists:

“When anthropologists arrive in a village,” he said, “the locals hide all their modern things and perform only what the outsiders expect — the primitive scenes they came to see.”

“They already know that gaze,” he said, “that curious, exoticizing gaze — and what it means.”

The image on the right, he said, was from a film many Chinese people knew — the so-called ‘anti-China’ documentary that the entire nation once criticized in the 1970s: Michelangelo Antonioni’s China.

“When Antonioni came to China then,” he said, “his camera was full of curiosity — intensely so.

He used every second, every bit of access, to capture Chinese people.”

“And the Chinese, watching him, were also staring — also curious.”

“In that film,” he said, “you can see them gazing back, intrigued by Antonioni’s strange clothes.”

He smiled and said, “It’s funny, isn’t it? Curiosity works both ways.”

“So,” he said finally, “when we look at our own culture — at ourselves — with that same curiosity, perhaps it becomes a meaningful act, especially now, as China rises.”

Then he laughed and said, “Actually, this title — Viewing Oneself with Curiosity — was taken from our graduate-exam question.”

He paused and added playfully, “I confess — I plagiarized it from my colleague, Professor Nariblig, a Mongolian scholar.”

He said, “He once said: ‘When anthropological knowledge — or even anthropological common sense — becomes widespread in China, that will be the day our national literacy truly rises.’”

He smiled and ended simply:

“All right. Thank you, everyone.”